Long-time readers have noticed that I tend to hype free software and
resources from time to time.

After SB redesigned the skin for our blogs, I decided that I should
redo the banner. The old one was done in brown, specifically
to match the old page style. It looked dorky after the
redesign.

So, I used GIMP,
the GNU Image Manipulation Program, to design a new one. It’s
a free program that runs on Linux/Unix, Windows, or Mac.

The
images were taken from an image
bank at CNS Forums, sponsored by Lundbeck,
a pharmaceutical firm. The images can be used freely by
anyone, so long as they link back to the CNS Forum site. The
banner itself can’t be linked to anything other than my main page, so I
put a link in the sidebar.

The image was built in layers. The bottom layer has a
background from a photomicrograph of some neurons, tinted the same
shade of green as one of the right-sidebar colors. The next
layer has the two images from CNS forums, resized to fit. The
next layer has the drop shadow, and the top layer has the text.
The font is the Ringbearer font, from www.1001fonts.com.

Comments

I gave the new banner the same name as the old one, which over-wrote the old one. I did it that way, so that I would not have to edit any templates.

Your browser does not have any way of knowing that it has changed, so it uses a cached copy of the old one. If you hold down the shift key and click on the Refresh icon, it should force the browser to load the new image.